Valve to reconsider episodic game releases

Any fan of Half-Life 2 will know that when Valve says it will deliver episodic content it doesn’t mean you will be getting new content every few months. So far, only Episode One has made it into the shops, with Episode Two arriving shortly bundled with Team Fortress 2 and the unusual Portal game.

During a recent interview with Computer and Videogames, (CVG) managing director of Valve, Gabe Newell, discussed how the company is going to take a look at how it delivers games to the public after it completed this round of episodic content with Episode Three. He said:

I think what we really want to do is have a couple of examples out there–Episode One, and how long it was to play and how long it took to develop, Episode Two, Portal, and TF2 and then the third part of the trilogy; and then sit down with the community and say, ‘OK, so what do you want?’ … Do you want us to do more episodes? Do you want us to really tighten down the time frames and look at the scope of what we’re doing so that that’s possible, for us to go back to the large monolithic projects?

Gabe has said he also wants to sit down with other developers that he considers delivering episodic content and mentioned two developers in particular he would like to swap notes with. The first is Traveler’s Tales, which has seen success with the Sam & Max episodes and more unusually Blizzard, which Gabe believes delivers episodic content in the form of updates to the World of Warcraft.

I think when Valve first announced episodic content for Half-Life 2, fans were impressed and eager to play. Back then episodes meant bite-size chunks of gameplay on a regular basis. Now, they almost seem like developments that take as long as full games, and when they do finally get released they are over in a few hours. Valve would do better returning to big game releases, but keep the multi-player and smaller game projects separate and more regular. For example, release a Team Fortress style game and a Portal style game every year and a new Half-Life game every couple of years.

Speak Your Mind

SalCan

In an ideal world episodes would be awesome- they could come along every month, offer a few news hours of gameplay, a few weapon/feature, and another part of the story. This is much better than the HL to HL2 wait which was what- six years?

The problem is that it is almost impossible to do episodes correctly. It take more than a month to release even a short part of a game, the episode system is expensive (so far HL2 has cost players over $100 in total if you did Orange box), you can end up paying for older releases more than once (with orange box).

I’ll stop ranting… I could go on for awhile about virtues and faults of Valve’s recent decisions.

As games & their engines get more complex, the concept of developing (monthly/quarterly) episodes on the fly is a non-starter.

I would suggest a comparison to decent episodic TV, where the episodes are mainly made in advance.

For example, BBC’s Blue Planet was 8 or so 40 minute episodes (from memory). How long did it take to put together? 5 years. That was mainly waiting for conditions for filming events, with substantial production/editing afterwards.

Look how long it was between HL & HL2. Was it worth it? I think so. Especially if you consider all the me too copy cat below par games released in the interim.

The other option would be parallel processing – get the main game done & then farm out episodes to multiple developers.

One good episode a year would do me, for some of those dark winter nights.